The goals of our research program are to understand how children learn to read during the initial period when the mechanics of the process are being acquired; to identify what aspects of the process might prove difficult and explain why children have reading problems; to test the effectiveness of instructional solutions. One of the most important acquisitions in learning to read is learning to recognize printed words. Researchers disagree about how children develop this capability and which skills and experiences contribute most. We have proposed a theory of printed word learning which incorporates several of these skills and experiences and indicates how they are important. This theory portrays beginning reading as a process of forming alphabetic images of words in memory and amalgamating these orthographic identities with other word identities--phonological, syntactic, and semantic--already lodged in the lexicon as a consequence of the learner's competence with spoken language. We have begun a research program to collect evidence for the theory. Initial studies have been completed and results are positive, encouraging and highly suggestive of future work to be done. Our evidence confirms that beginning readers do possess orthographic images of printed works, that these images improve their memory for sounds, and that this capability distinguishes more from less proficient beginners, particularly in terms of their printed word knowledge. The experiments described in this proposal constitute the second phase of the research program. They extend previous findings and test additional hypotheses derived from the theory.